It may seem strange (considering my age and all) but I am a big fan of the animated series "Avatar, The Last Airbender". It’s a quirky story about a world where every nation has a specific power or ability to interact with the forces of nature (earth, wind, fire, and water) and command them by "bending" them.
It may also surprise you to know that I'm a huge fan of M. Night Shyamalan (director of "Sixth Sense", "Signs", "The Village" and "Lady in the Water" - some of my favs) so you can only imagine how COMPLETELY excited I was to hear that he was doing a movie about the quirky little cartoon!
Unfortunately, I've been told that M. Night's portrayal of the characters is very different from those in the cartoon. The slapstick sidekick of Aang, the avatar, isn't funny or slapstick. His antics in the cartoon were part of why I watched the show. That alone is keeping me out of the theater. Of course M. Night is not the creator of the cartoon characters; he is merely an observer who took his interpretation of the personalities and put them on film. It makes me wonder what Jeremy Zuckerman, composer of the original series, thought of M. Night's characterizations. He must be disappointed that M. Night didn't value his version of the characters enough to maintain their personalities as he had written them.
All this got me to thinking, dangerous - I know! Have I done that to people? Have people done that to me? Have I made snap judgments on who a person is and then represented them to others as MY version? Have I, in all my "brilliance and discernment", created false, disappointing versions of someone only to portray them as such? Did I rewrite who they are? It has been known to happen.
God created the perfect version of us when we were "formed in our mother's womb". Ps 139:13 "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." Inmost being in Hebrew literally means "kidneys" but is also a Hebrew idiom meaning "the innermost center of emotions and of moral sensitivity", that part of us that makes us who we are.
People will tell you that time, environment, and experience form our personalities and make us who we are but the truth is God made a perfect version of us at our beginning. "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well." (Ps 139:14) Yes, all those influences - time, environment and experience - affect who we are but they did not form who we are. God's version of us, the one "written in His book" before one day of our life even began is the version He designed knowing what every day of our life held. (Ps 139:16)
David, the author of Psalm 139, recognized God's love for him in verses 17 & 18 "How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can't even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me!" God's love is the same for us!
Maybe Jeremy Zuckerman is disappointed, too, in M. Night's version of his airbending characters, but it didn't change who they truly are. Jeremy still knows them well and continues to write about them in their original form. God won't let us down, either. His version of us has not changed and He is still watching our story unfold. He loves us and sees us in His version and is NEVER influenced by anyone else’s view of us. We need to look for the "God version" of ourselves and others and remember that we can walk with great confidence knowing God's is the true version of who we are - and the ONLY ONE that really counts!
